Architecture without Ego
In Japan’s architectural post-postmodern and economic post-bubble era, a period starting with the first decade of the 21st century, Japanese cities by now present a staccato of banal and repetative concrete or glass boxes, minimal or overdecorated, small or huge, low-rise or stacked high into the sky resulting in a townscape which has been basically designed by the same mind-set which gave birth to the first phase of modern architecture. With a single book, — namely Architecture without Architects published in 1964 — , Bernard Rudofsky reduced the majority of the artefacts of the Modern Movement to nothing but a huge mind-trip.
That by itself was quite a feat accomplished by one person, but unfortunately not very inspiring or helpful for the future. His book remained a collection of exotic and nostalgic images of an Age of Innocense, because it missed an important point: however much we may be attracted by such images of a more primitive way of building, we cannot go back in evolution. All the stunning pieces of indigenous architecture from all over the world he had collected as proof for his main thesis, did in fact have architects — admittedly, not in the sense of present-day architects academically trained to selfconscious “artists”, but of traditional skilled builders and artisan-carpenters.
At present, we are more and more surrounded, invaded, yes, often mesmerized by an architecture, which could be summoned up as grotesque outputs of the egos of relatively few brand name star architects. To extend or better correct Rudofsky’s indirect critique of the Modern Movement we here propose a plea for the need of an “Architecture not without Architects”, but of an “Architecture, yes, with Architects, but Architects without Ego”.
The architecture of this new group of architects does already exists but it is neither well recognized nor well published. We are too much dazzled by the present propaganda of globally spread super-structures — here I refer to both corporate offices, hotels or museums all designed seemingly without financial limits, and also to the anonymous trash of consumer architecture. So far a term proper or catch phrase for this new type of architecture is missing. What I am hinting at here, is an architecture without ego as against an architecture of unsustainable consumption, mere vanity and pure waste.
Prof. Kiyokazu Arai`s two recent extensions to the campus of Seika University in the north of Kyoto, could easily be counted among this new category of an egoless architecture which, by the way, does not mean an anonymous one. It definitely does not belong to the well-known common breed of post-modern and post-bubble architecture of Japan any longer. Arai sets the stage to an architecture which has a new character; to me it exhibits simultanously a formal and structural language globally applicable, and on the other hand, it reflects something of the traditional Kyoto townhouses, a type of ‘vernacular’ Japanese architecture close to Rudofsky's “the Architecture without Architects”
When we encounter it we do not feel like reacting to his architecture emotionally as we do to the new anonymous mess in downtown Kyoto, Osaka or any other Japanese city, nor do we feel like being forced to having to admire or praise it like any of the latest architectural stunt acts or emblems of present-day materialistic culture as visible in Dubai, Beijing or Hongkong. We pass or use his buildings quietly without being disturbed. The outside of the buildings is more hinting at the work of a refined artisan than brand-name architect of our days. What a relieve! And still his architecture is unique and new. Where are the traces of the ego of the architect here, one askes.
The design problems we confront today in the Age of Globalization are not so much related to a choice between an architecture of ever increasing universal global character versus an architecture of local sense of place, — to paraphrase Kenneth Frampton concerns —, but to a choice between an architecture of, or without ego, — and here I include the ego of individual architect as well as corporate and national egos.
It is questionable whether absolute energy hogs like the national TV tower in Beijing or other bravour pieces of skyscrapers and corporate headquarters — notwithstanding their dominating political and economic power in our societies — should uncritically be accepted as the most important visual landmarks of our urban silhouettes. Should an architect just play the role of a hore in the process of environmental abuse, or ever increasing cycle of our throw-away culture and hunger after aesthetic novelty?
Our world is slowly converted into a life of Hungry Ghosts of Buddhist lore with ever quicker rates of production and consumption of anything glittering and new, and ever less feeling of any contentment. Mankind relax, one wants to wish to ourselves! Look at nature, there everything is constantly new, individual, original and ever refreshing. Not even two fallen leaves are the same.
We seem to have forgotten, the truly new seems to arise automatically whenever there is freedom from the xerox-copying machine of the ego, and that not only in architecture. The truly creative mind, — neither struggling simply for novelty nor being enslaved by a nostalgia for the past will forever play the role of a hollow bamboo, — to use an ancient Chinese metaphor.
Taking up what I mentioned about a certain quality of non-ego in Arai's new buildings and a reference to — not at all imitation of — the Kyo-Machiya, the traditional Kyoto urban dwelling, he admitted in an informal interview to two main strains of inspiration: one is related to the actual physical site of Seika University which gently winds itself up a valley in the northern mountains of Kyoto. Arai wanted to follow that movement presented by nature itself with his new buildings. The site came with certain restrictions in terms of height, color, and roof-form, since it is part of the fuchi-chiku of Kyoto, a special preservation zone of green encircling the north, west and east of the old city of Kyoto. So the buildings had to be low.
The other inspiration has come from the structure and spatial delicacies of the traditional urban dwellings in Kyoto. There are the latticed windows and verandhas which constitute their facades and in reality very efficiently filter light, air and visibility. The “modern” latticing of the facades of Arai's buildings towards the road — even though very different in scale, material and color, does indeed give the campus now something of the architectural quality of Kyoto's traditional machinami or streetscapes.
Another characteristic feature of the traditional Kyoto townhouses are their narrow interior courtyards, the tsubo-niwa. The space requirements of the program for Seika's departments of Manga, Visual Design, Hanga and Western Painting were so large, that the buildings became too deep for enough light and ventilation. This led Arai to incorporate interior courts, somewhat narrow and high, for the lower part of the complex, prodiving a highly conmplex sense of place within the buildings. The slightly odd shapes of the buildings beyond this chain of interior courtyards, that is, on the side opposite the street, become individual structures of their own, with facades suggesting buildings higher than they really are.
This double inspiration brought about a pleasant break with the conrete boxes with holes as windows, which is the basic building type of which Seika Campus abounds so far.
Whether Arai's buildings live up to recent new standards of a sustainable and eco-conscious architecture, in terms of carbon emissions and renewable energy, is clearly beyond this appraisal here, but his architecture would surely grow even more on us if it had been incorporated.
Obviously, Arai's architecture will not establish a new style, here provisionally termed an “Architecture without Ego”, with one stroke but it introduces an exeption into our time which seems so mesmerized by what here was called the international brand name architecture. It re-kindles one's faith in the architect as a socially conscientious professional and skillfull artisan.
The above view of Halong Bay — a UNESCO World Heritage Site — summarizes Vietnam of today: unspoiled scenic beauty, low-tech architecture and slow-speed boats, all managed by an honest communist effort to come to terms with an invasion of a global economy.
Since ancient times Hanoi has been a city structured by lakes and rivers, plenty of urban green and surrounded by an area of loosely interwoven trade villages. Hopefully Hanoi will not learn from the models of the modern Western city-planning nor imitate modern Western city-center redevelopment with its centripetally increasing building height and population density. So far, Hanoi has carefully preserved a urban structure and growth pattern in the form of a inverted pyramid, with lowest height of buildings in the center and density and height increasing towards the perimeter. If this pattern could be retained, strengthened and translated into architectural poetry, the whole modern planning world could learn from it.
Hanoi can be roughly described as a city in three layers. The central area of Hanoi is formed by the huge Hoan Kiem Lake and the original old 36 Streets or Quarters towards its north, laid out around the 13th century. The buildings stand mostly on very narrow deep plots from two to five stories high. The succeeding layer is characterized by rather wide tree-lined boulevards, surely one of the golden eggs French colonial rule left behind. These boulevards have wide pedestrian sidewalks, and their 19th and early 20th century architecture is very European in flavour, but built on far wider plots; they often have front gardens. On the whole one is not oppressed by too much architectural ego, so to say. The buildings are mostly from five to seven stories, naturally with the exception of modernist towerblocks like Hilton Hotel. The outmost third layer is marked by more recent and rather haphazard growth around ancient villages.
One gets a taste of this outer zone on one’s approximately one hour’s drive from the airport into Hanoi: first right and left just finished huge, but flat industrial estates of international enterprises, then through suburban villages with a lot of street life and a type of building similar to that in the original center of Hanoi, equally on a narrow sites of 3–5m width but often 30m deep, with a strange 4–6 story high building, facing the street, and all of them, having a roofed open verandah on their top. If there is a common architectural denominator to indigenous or regional Hanoi architecture, then it is this type of building. It follows you on your drive from then on right up to the old 36 Quarters of old Hanoi.
The developing countries in East Asia, and therefore also Vietnam, try to survive in a very schizophrenic context in the moment: one the one hand they themselves wish and they are pushed internationally to develop as quickly as possible, — and that is the carrot side if the situation; it is speeded up by the massive influx of international money; on the other hand, they are urged not to pollute their environments and use sustainable development policies in industry and architecture and urban planning. And that is the stick of the present situation. The developed societies warn them from their own recent experience against further pollution and unsustainable growth, but simultaneously crave their cheap labour and build up manufacturing capacity. The West’s expectation and pressure for ever more and cheaper goods and simultanously for responsible and sustainable environmental behaviour is plain unreasonable, useless and ultimately self-destructive; pollution of the air and water doesn’t stop at regional or national boundaries any longer.
Strolling through the Old Quarters north of Hoan Kiem Lake one realizes suddenly what Lawsonification has done to our central city, Japan included. These centrally computer-controlled and externally architecturally identical garagelike stores for groceries and other daily necessities, — Lawson, 7 and 11, and others — open twenty-four hours and staffed by part-timers in shifts, have practically eradicated the old pa-and-ma variety of groceries and to a great degree monotonized streetscapes of our inner cities. In old Hanoi this old variety and complexity of multi-use architecture mixed with owned housing still exists. Naturally, one could easily miss the noise and danger of the ever-present motor-cycle, or have at least their exhausts cleaned up; but the motor car would probably destroy the whole spuke even quicker. Perhaps, and this is my fear, this unique architecture and atmosphere nursed by the very owners of each plot will probably disappear here fairly soon, too. It would be a pity if it were replaced by the common Mori Hills formula of Tokyo’s Roppongi district. Yes, Mori does claim his redevelopment schemes of super high-rise architecture contain diverse urban functions and uses, but all at one point on top of each other, designed and controlled by just one huge financial outfit, and ultimately owned by some anonymous shareholders who sit in Florida or on the Bermudas.
There should be no misunderstanding, I am not suggesting to enshrine the architecture of these old 36 Quarters of Hanoi, far from it, I suggest to learn from it in a social and architectural sense. No modern academically trained architect today could or even would want to continue the complexity of this street architecture, created by the thousand hands and minds of the anonymous dwellers there over a couple of decades, yes, centuries. It is true critical regional architecture marked by a subtle balance between the social, architectural and economic goals and needs of a particular society. More than urban architecture, it is a kind of urban nature. It has grown over a long time, and it constantly renews itself organically, even though in very small steps and jumps. But I wish to emphasize that everyone from this globe who travels to Hanoi today will end up next day in some coffee or restaurant or boutique of the old city. It has a transnational and transracial attraction.
Development of the individual human or of whole cultures mostly occurs in three stages: it starts with an urge to fulfill basic material needs, like food, shelter and love, and is followed by the urge to satisfy aesthetic needs such as, with cultural luxuries and pleasures which come with riches and power. Spiritual needs mostly — there are exceptions in history — arise in the human being after the fulfillment of the previous two. Neither individuals nor civilizations can probably take a shortcut, even though — as we witness in East Asia in the moment — the speed of material and aesthetic development seems to increase exponentially in recent history. Spiritual voices from the East Asia are mute so far.
So, for the Westerner, going to Hanoi makes us aware of what we have lost in our cities, and what we should help the Vietnamese to treasure, keep and nurture.
The Harbor Terminal built in 2006 on the Island of Naoshima surely reaches a climax of an already well-discussed fashionable wave towards ever more lightness, brightness, transparency and insubstantiality in Japanese architectural design, especially in the life work of Sejima Kazuyo and Nishizawa Ryue. Functionally, here on Naoshima one large “super-flat” metal roof covers a ticket office, a waiting hall for ferry passengers, a souvenir and coffee shop, and a flexible event hall, and in addition, provides ample space for casual parking.
As for modern product design, one feels that a similar climax in minimalism had been reached by a steel table, 9.5m long, 2.6 m wide, made of a single prestressed 3mm thick steel plate, which rested just on four legs on its corners. It was the brainchild of Ishigami Junya, a young architect from Tokyo.
Yes, both structures even though at different scale are light and thin alright, but do they convey grace? Or do they simply remind us of a magician’s floating or levitation act?
The trend towards lighter and more diaphanous structures in human architecture and product design started ages ago, it did not coincide with the rise of the modern movement in the early 20th century, nor is it presently just a fashion in Japan. Perhaps it does not appear just accidentally at this point in wider human history. It can be understood as an unconscious artistic expression of a particular stage in the evolution of human consciousness when it developed a growing awareness and desire to express transparency. In an essay meant as an introduction to a Japanese Design and Architecture Exhibition at the Lousianna Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen in 1995, I had introduced Jean Gebser’s, a 20th century German thinker’s unique vision and interpretation of human art and architecture which has escaped the notice of architectural awareness so far. In his life’s opus which he had called “Origin and Present — Foundations of an Aperspective World — Contribution to a History of the Growth of Consciousness”, he links the evolution of human material and behavioral culture to the growth of the evolution of human consciousness, and that from its most ancient past up to now: he interprets this evolution as a process from an archaic, via a magic, a mythic, a mental to a transparent phase. According to him the archaic phase showed the human being still very much in unison with nature, in the magical phase there appears a first emergence of an awareness of a self differentiated from nature; in the mythical epoch an early verbal mind is developed, and at the mental phase of evolution, basically our modern time, the human being acquires a fully fledged ego in opposition to his body and nature as such. In the fifth, or what Gebser called the integral phase of evolution, the human being experiences wholeness, unison with everything. To Gebser this means that from here on the previous levels of consciousness have become transparent to the human being. He argues that this “integrating diaphanization” is the central feature of human consciousness to come, even though this “future” has probably started already with the birth of Gautama Buddha.
Naoshima: transparency with glass
Naoashima: superflat
Does this increasing inner sense of unity, transparency and lightness perhaps also express itself in an urge to make our external creations also lighter and more transparent? Should they become more graceful? Yes, definitely, but to be precise not in a sense of levitation and ultimate disappearance but perhaps more in a sense of grace balanced by gravity. To illustrate what is meant here by balance of gravity and grace, and by transparency in some of the best human design, here an image from ancient China — also just a roof floating over a viewing spot in Guilin, and an image from Japan — the interpenetration of rooms in a traditional Japanese townhouse in Takayama, a transparency achieved without the use of glass.
No doubt, to recognize and/or create true grace, you will have to be of that fifth stage of consciousness yourself. It can’t just be achieved by a couple of formal tricks or by magic. On this earth, — however much we may pretend in our creations or behaviour — we will never defeat gravity. And there is nothing perverse about weightlessness in space, but there is here on earth. Yes, recent space and rocket technology will influence our creations here in our architectural forms. These forms will not just be childish but definitely an expression of a change of consciousness.
Grace we find best at the two extremes of the immense spectrum of consciousness, in the realm of the unconscious, — a flock of cranes dancing — , or at the other end, in the superconscious or the holistic, — a Buddha statue, sitting on the crest of a lotus flower — perhaps the only image of a human being truly sitting and grounded, but nevertheless floating, a perfect balance between gravity and grace, no tricks.
Admittedly, such balance is difficult to enter into internally or to build externally. But the best of human creations have made it visible throughout the ages. The two above structures — the terminal and the table — don’t show a victory over gravity, but quite to the contrary, a fight with and cheating of gravity; gravity cannot be overcome in the physical body in a physical universe. A table seemingly floating in mid-air is a magician’s trick, so is an absolutely flat roof, only 15 cm thick. These architects belong more to the guild of magicians than builders. They don’t work with gravity, like for instance, a spiders web or a suspension bridge does, they work against it. They only fox the eye of the beholder.
Ishigami Junya: magic table
We can make poems or build but intimations of a balance between gravity and grace. In other words, we can “dream” about it, build substitutes of it. That is our tragedy as humans, we can intuit the real, — a sense of unity, a sense of global wholeness and grace, but we do and live only a substitutes of it in our various cultures in history — that’s what human culture ultimately has been and is: a substitute for what we really want and what are truly capable of achieving. Look at man’s latest attempts to reach the sky, in Beijing, in Dubai, New York or Paris, to mention only the names of places rather than those of their designers: we fake, not show grace.
In summary: we may ask, is the Naoshima Terminal a structural bravour piece? Yes, definitely, but it surely does not disclose how this roof — looking like a sheet of white paper — is actually be held up.
Is it an architectural bravour piece? Visually, it comes close to the equivalent of a architectural floating carpet of Arabian magic tradition. Functionally, open on all four sides, it probably fulfills its required program; experientially, our critique with such post-Miesian openness and glassiness is: you approach it, you see it all and at once, and there will be nothing else left to discover and conquer the next time.
Is it an environmental or ecological bravour piece: hardly. One has the feeling that this building can hardly sustain itself energetically, forgetting about it producing extra energy. If public works projects can’t be build environmentally and ecologically more friendly, and energywise more sustainable, then which projects will be?
China: gravity and grace
Japan: transparency without glass
The basic difference between Sejima’s Naoshima terminal building and the traditionally Chinese roof structure quoted here is similar to that between a fakir standing on one leg for hours or days and presenting an image of tension and stress, and a yogin who sits on a posture of utmost ease — and thus emanates ease to the viewer, too.
The human being — in his own body and in his creations — has always been and always will be struggling with the “Disease of Time”, that is impermanence, decay over time and finally exstinction. From a Western biblical perspective one could say that the human being is punished for his original sin by the disease of time. Never again after the “fall” has the human being been at ease with time. Deep down he realizes that time cannot be healed, however, he discovered very early that it can be renewed. “Time flies, as they say — or time renews itself as we would say”, Prof. Tiwari from Nepal added to his New Years wishes last April.
Here a view of the Karesansui or Dry Landscape Garden of Ryoanji, a Zen Temple in Kyoto from April 2006. Present scholarship places its origin approximately into the middle of the 15th century. The designers and their intentions remain basically unknown. But Ryoanji, like no other extant traditional Japanese garden, has become a new paradigm of landscape design in modern times all over world, and even in Japan itself. In a strange sense it survives by ever more clones and permutations.
Closer looks, however, reveal that this garden must have recently undergone a major facelift which no Westener would have expected, or if he had been asked , would not have easily condoned. Not only was the roof of the surrounding wall furnished with brand new shingles, all the rocks were washed down and thus denuded of their admired patina and very small and subtle moss which had settled there over hundreds of years and thus had become part of their particular beauty to us. As one discovered in the process of cleaning it wasn’t simply moss, but Lichen, a symbiotic combination of two life forms, algae and fungi, that had covered the rocks and was slowly splitting and dissolving them. (1)
When the rocks were washed down and freed of their accumulated layers of dust and parasitic growth, what re-appeared was not something like the ‘original face’ of those rocks, the archetype “rock” as such, but just their hypothetical face as of 1450. Who knows whether the stones were not covered with some moss already at the time when they were actually set into the garden? Their original color and structure will irretrievably be lost.
The recent restoration in Ryoanji has nothing mystical, religious or ritualistic about it. It was just some partial repair or restoration within the garden, as is usual in the architecture and gardens of the West, too. It was a purely physical act. After some time this restoration will have to be done again. By restoration, aging and decay, the disease of time, cannot be healed. Time will ultimately win. In this context it is notable that in India the name of the all-loving and all-devouring Goddess Kali derives from the Sanskrit kal meaning black, time, and death. She is a personification of the disease of time in East Asia.
Here a few famous examples of such repair and restoration work Japan: Katsura Detached Villa was completely disassembled and re-built from 1976 to 1982, even though every visitor nowadays will be told that the present form is that of the middle of the 17th century. The much admired machiya, or wooden Kyoto townhouses, have always been subject to ravaging conflagrations in history and were quickly replaced, not as strict copies of the old ones but with reasonable adjustments and alterations. In more modern times, the Metabolists, a group of Japanese progressive architects in the early 60’s used the very recognition of different life or decay cycles of human beings and man-made artefacts, — combined with different scales of building operation in modern times —, as the main structuring feature for their own urban design proposals in the last half of the twentieth century.
Modern Japanese preservation policies of traditional single buildings or groups of buildings are out of tune with this traditional practice of restoration, repair and exchange. The reason is, that these laws were based on European strategies and policies of preservation; but those were basically meant and formulated for stone buildings, and not for one- or two-storied wooden ones as existed in Japan up to the mid-19th century.
Time might not be able to be healed, but the human being from early on discovered that it can be ritually renewed. Probably mostly unknown to the rest of the world but in actual fact rites of renewal are still very pervasive in contemporary Japanese culture. They inform the very form and content of Shinto liturgy and its ritual behaviour. The biggest rite of renewal in architectural terms is the shiki-nen-sengu, the renewal of the Imperial Ancestor Shrines at Ise at fixed intervals, i.e. every twenty, or originally, every 19 years. About 15, 000 Hinoki trees, all about 200 years old, will be felled for this re-construction of the overall 115 sanctuaries. The cutting of the first tree for the sixty-second renewal has been performed again this spring, naturally in utter secrecy and at night.
It is officially one of the most ‘sacred’ ritual acts in the process of renewal as a whole — but in fact, it consists simply of the felling of two trees which after eight years will become the shin-no-mihashira, or, “the sacred pillar of the heart”, or in Western terms, “the holiest of holies” within the two sanctuaries. They will ultimately be buried underneath the reconstructed two main buildings of the Imperial Ancestor Shrines; one of these is dedicated to the deity of the sun, the other to that of food. Even for us in the 21st century the two deities could easily stand for the two most important energies sustaining human life on earth, sunlight and food. And adequately enough, these two “deities” are venerated in the form of a tree, reminding us of its sacred role in supplying us with oxygen to survive.
During this eight year long rite of rebuilding absolutely everything is going to be renewed, all the buildings, fences and gates, all the deity treasures and decorations inside the buildings and, last not least, all the thousands of white river pebbles spread in the precinct. The sight and smell of the renewed shrines confirms to us the strange paradox we require from the sacred object, it should always look very fresh, but simultaneously, be of the most ancient possible form, be beyond time as such, be something like ‘the original face’ of a sanctuary as such.
Such rites of renewal are still performed in Japan at various scales and at various time cycles, and of various local or national import. Here belong the annually recurring matsuri, or Shinto village festivals at a communal level, the rebuilding rites of Shinto shrines themselves, those occasional renewal rites for an individual, a particular group, or even just for an object, such as your new motor car; they are performed because one feels a need to recharge the depleted energy of valued objects, deities in shrines, of human beings, yes, even of the whole nation; the renewal of the whole nation is done at the occasion of a the daijo-sai, “The First-Fruits Great Tasting Ceremony” performed with each enthronement of a new emperor. Therefore, Japanese live now in the still infant years of heisei 18, not in 2006 as the West does.
Traditional and modern Japan has always known of both restoration and renewal. There is a great difference between restoration and renewal, not so much linguistically, but in terms of human action: restoration has a physical dimension, renewal has religious implications.
Restoration or repair is integral to a linear or historical understanding of time, an understanding of our world in terms of events along an irreversible time sequence; to counter this undeniable movement the human being developed a deep desire to freeze something to some arbitrary point in time, conceptually like in our efforts of writing and re-writing history, and architecturally by legally freezing important buildings at one particular authentic point in history. Here belongs the architecture of stone; the pyramids and Mediterranean temples. One tries to outwit time by a combination of the seemingly ever-lasting building material, rocks and stones, and clear geometrical shapes. The Western concept such as urbs eterna or City Beautiful is probably the supreme expression of this endeavor. This endeavour is bound to be frustrating and ultimately to be a failure. But here also belongs the enduring Chinese desire and strive for eternal youth and everlasting life, through taking a magic elixir that can heal time and thus make man physically live for ever. “Time is Money”, is the ultimate modern verbal rendering of this attitude. If you make enough money, you can buy yourself extra time, thus seemingly heal the disease of time.
Renewal is integral to a cyclic or seasonal understanding and feeling of time, prevalent in what we have now relegated to “primitive” cultures or cultures who still live more in unison with nature; it is akin to melting with the a flow of nature, in its seasonal rhythms; to an identification with the whole, i. e. with the tree, not the leaf. With such vision time seems reversible and the human being renewable, since the human being here experiences himself as sustained by a larger, as we would say, global energy than his own limited one. The architecture we find here is and has been mostly of wood or other easily perishable materials, thus subject to fires or cyclones; zones with monsoon climates is its natural habitat. Here belongs man’s ancient quest to heal the disease of time by ritual renewal. What kept those rituals alive up to our days is mostly a sacred and often secret tradition supported by a deep human need for renewal, and that despite an acceptance of the day-today rapid cultural changes.
In my student days I studied in some of the world’s most renowned libraries, such as the awe-inspiring library of the British Museum, — where supposedly the dream and the horror of communism was born —, or the much smaller library of Mackintosh’s Fine Arts School in Glasgow. Their difference in size was immense, but there was a common denominator shared by almost all the classical style libraries: that was their dark atmosphere, dim spot lights only, hardly any sound, only whispering; visually you were surrounded by stacks of mostly leather bound and dusty books looking all very ancient. Both buildings were center oriented, inward looking only. You were meant to be glued to your seat over your book. One had the feeling of being in a monastic setting with ancient editions of the Bible, the Greek tragedies and other heavy volumes of sacred wisdom. One wasn’t allowed to speak, forget about laughing. Libraries were conceived as castles of learning, education and ancient wisdom, as if education by default had to be directed backwards. And above all, the accent was on seriousness.
The results of this cloistered and serious paradigm of human learning, whether in the dark halls of Oxford, Harvard or Berlin, ultimately sanctioned by the “religions of the book” from 2000 to 2500 years ago and not derived from “religions of personal experience”, are not encouraging: the 20th century was the bloodiest in human history, and the 21st promises to beat the gruesome record.
If we envisage a brighter future, we shall have to give birth to a completely new human being, and perhaps start with a completely new paradigm of education; we shall have to build completely new institutions for this education, including libraries. After centuries of sectarian bloodshed man had finally adopted a general principle of freedom of religion and of all kinds of socio-cultural philosophies; this principle failed miserably; we need freedom from religion, from all philosophical and socalled “divine” teachings! We need light, directly.
Where should we start? Enlightened masters of old and modern brain scientists tell us that it might be too late to initiate such new paradigm of learning at the level of higher education, our universities. The cultural hypnoses of different countries are usually fully accomplished before the age of 14, before puberty. That is the age when the human mind is most pliable. That is the most formative phase of life. The basic cultural hypnosis of any country, or what we usually refer to as “education” is finished by that age. Ask a person of 42 or 80 a spiritual question and he or she will answer automatically by reciting what he has been taught at around the age 10 to 14. After that age human intelligence in most cases seems to stop growing. Thus, the new human being has to be created between birth and the age of 14.
Photo Plans
Architects are hardly equipped to create this new paradigm, but they can intuitively give birth to its new outer form and setting. It has been the role of the artist, more than of anyone else, to foresee and give form to new human growth through his work by intuition, not logic.
A step in the direction of more light in our educational institutions is the Library of Picture Books in Iwaki City of Fukushima Prefecture by Tadao Ando. Here the overall atmosphere is bright, transparent, airy; nearly from any point inside the library one has a view over green closeby and over the ocean far away; no dust on or inside the books; from the walls with open bookshelves up to the ceiling every book is quasi laughing at you. This organization of the books in their individual cubicles seems to echo the structure of our human memory in the brain. In this library bright colours and funny forms and figures surround you everywhere. I am sure there is no sign, don’t laugh, anywhere. An atmosphere of playfulness, not awe or indoctrination, is the hallmark of this new paradigm of educational facility: it is new in content, and new in outer form.
Admittedly this is a library for children’s books, picture books from all over the world, donated from a private collection. But to my mind it moves away from the established classical paradigm of what a library was and what it should look like. About ten years ago, in the mid-nineties Tadao Ando had broken perhaps the most important traditional paradigm in East Asian architecture, and that has been the form of a Buddhist temple. With his Watertemple Honpukuji on Awajishima from the mid-nineties he practically single-handedly ended a 2000 year old tradition in Buddhism to base their temple architecture, in form and larger spatial order, on the architecture of the Chinese Imperial Palace. A new Buddhist temple built today in the old paradigm would be an obvious anachronism or simply a bad joke to everyone.
Something similar happened here with the crystallization of a new prototype of library in Iwaki City. Tectonically, Ando does in this project, what he does best and what he has done best before at this particular scale of operation: he penetrates a square with an oblong rectangular form, and that in addition, on a slope. The complex spaces of the library are born at that junction out of this ‘simple’ interpenetration.
The library with various flights of stairs give children ample space to withdraw to their favourite corner and read, go to places to play together or to places to look outside and just dream. This library allows free movement, yes, breathes a sense of freedom. It does not need wardens to enforce rules. It is meant and designed as a domain of innocence, playfulness and joy.
The materials used are few: fair-faced concrete, glass, and wooden flooring, full-stop. No firlefans, no added decoration anywhere. Or? Yes, there are these immense free-standing concrete walls: two of them on the steps carry the roof, the other one outside the roofed building carries nothing. It reflects light. But, in effect, it is a light wall.
As often, Tadao Ando uses in his library the heaviest building material available, namely reinforced concrete, but what he really creates are spaces made of light. He plays with one of the deep mysteries in this universe: we cannot see light directly, not even in outer space. To make clear what is hinted at here in his building: imagine the sight of a leaf being hit by a ray of light in an otherwise dark forest and thus being turned into light itself. Result: matter reveals light to our eyes, as light reveals matter to us. Form discloses the formless, and the formless discloses form, in Buddhist terms.
OutsideInside
Honpukuji
Library Exterior
At first glance one feels like congratulating Toyo Ito for bringing some designed playfulness and fantasy back into the ubiquitous monotony of the usual glass curtain walling with equal distanced mullions in of our urban commercial districts. The pervasiveness of this paradigm of the architecture in the modern movement has probably less to do with any mesmerizing influence of the puritan work or personality of a Mies von der Rohe or even demands of economics but rather with a lack of joy and fantasy in the minds of contemporary architects.
The last time the organic metaphor has spooked massively through architectural designs in Japan was in the proposals of the Metabolists in Japan and those of TEAM X in Europe during the early 60’s, but we should remember that it has practically accompanied Western architecture with its fixation on the “orders” since ancient Egypt; I am thinking of the architectural column built in the image of a tree with flowers on top and bases for roots at the bottom. Till the middle of the twentieth century there was practically not a single building on the globe which wanted to exude a sense of political, economic or religious power that did not use Greek columns at some place of the façade or the interior to signal their legitimacy and trustworthiness as institutions.
What is one supposed to believe when one faces the latest formal organic metaphor of Toyo Ito’s L-shaped Tod’s Omote Sando Building, a new store for Italian brand shoes and bags in Tokyo. Is the facade really based on some repeatable new structural principle or is it simply a “lip service” to some kind of environmentally friendly or “green” architecture? One probably is not wrong to assume that this building is structurally rather expensive, less easy to maintain and less energy efficient than its old-fashioned and to our eyes more “boring” neighbours of yesterday.
There already exist plenty of modern building envelopes which truly interact with the environment actively, — like breathing skin to use the organic analogue —, which preserve, yes even produce energy in summer and winter, and which make a building thus more sustainable in a world becoming slowly aware of our global dwindling energy sources.
Every day we are fed new Hiob’s Messages about a deteriorating natural and urban environment surrounding us. Are Kisho Kurokawa’s or Toyo Ito’s “tree houses”, i.e. architecture in the image of the organically grown world, or the tree-boxes in the Japanese Ritsurin Park, i.e. nature in the image of man-made shapes, are they addressing our problems, or are they just plain Kitsch or a kind of perversity. A building might grow over time, but never in the shape of an tree. It is very difficult to argue that there is perversity in nature; it rather seems to be the product of the human mind and its creations.
To paraphrase Christopher Alexander, the city is not a tree, nor is a single building. Should it look like one? Should it look like an zelcova tree or like a pine tree if by some accident there are such trees planted along the street?
Perhaps what we face here is just clever salesmanship, a new advertising stunt to seduce us to consume some luxury or brand items offered inside the building, somewhat recalling Oldenberg’s proposal for a banana-shaped skyscraper on 42nd street in New York, — or just playfulness, as suggested at the start, often coming with leisure or with money, or, and I myself lean towards this assumption, simply deep confusion and unawareness about means and ends in architecture, about tectonics and ornament, about natural and built form. We design buildings which look like plants and clip plants so that they resemble furniture or buildings.
The only thing missing here one feels is a display of a large green product logo of approval at the entry similar to those we find nowadays on specifically “pure” organic food in the better department stores, only here in the case of the consumption of a built artefact it would have to be issued by some internationally recognized “International Green Architectural Society” guaranteeing the building’s authenticity as an environmentally friendly piece of architecture.
St. Louis, USA — The Orders
K. Kurokawa’s plant-type community
Trees as architecture, Ritsurin Park
With the Lotos House Kengo Kuma sees himself building in the very best of Western modern architecture. He admits to have been inspired by Mies von der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavillon of the late 1920’s. I, however, see him building in the best of pre-modern tradition of Japanese domestic architecture.
What his building and Mies’s Pavillon have in common is the use of steel columns as loadbearing elements, and stone as space defintions. But there the comparison ends. He does not use stone, here Travertine, as one would expect, in its inert heavy, layered quality piled up onto each other and visually subject to gravity, but he cuts his stone into thin sheets 30 mm thick and elegantly suspends these sheets by flat bars of stainless steel. This “ethereal wall” or floating stone screen becomes the façade.
Kengo Kuma, here and in earlier projects, is working from a background of deepseated archetypes of the Japanese traditional Sense of Place or MA, witnessed best at its climax for instance at Katsura Palace of the 17th century which even up to our days remains like an architectural Mecca for any Western architect visiting Japan. Emptiness and transparency have been the hidden theme of Katsura and are the theme of Kuma’s architecture.
His suspended grid “wall” of Travertine immediately brings to mind the sliding grid “walls” of the Japanese Shoji, the internal or external paper doors once so characteristic of any traditional dwelling in Japan. Naturally, the structure of his screens is very clever, from the mind of a creative selfconscious individual working in a context of high-tech-craft. The structure of the Shoji, in contrast, were the result of a trans-individual consensus of long generations of builders in a tradition of handi-craft. Still, the echo can’t be overlooked. This very echo gives his building cultural roots and historical context, even though it is surely condemned to remain a one-of-a-kind; the screens are unique, but hardly repeatable. The Shoji, by comparison, have been very ordinary, but respected and used for up to a thousand years.
The spatial interpenetration of inside and outside again reminds us of the best tradition of dwellings and temples with integrated gardens especially in Kyoto. In Japan the garden has always stood at the threshold of nature and culture; it is neither simply the one nor the other, but it discloses both in the form of art. In summary, Kengo Kuma’s Lotos House is a contemporary version of the eternal theme of the traditional Japanese arts: the discipline, or better, the play with the right angle and natural form. It reflects Japan today, fusion of East and West, of now and then, and of nature and architecture.
